Blog

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

WWTAWWTAG

Reading Rob Bell is like listening to pop music. It’s catchy, fun, and, when you turn it off, you walk around humming it just above a whisper. I’ve read a few of Bell’s books (Velvet Elvis, Sex God, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, Drops Like Stars), and I always get this feeling inside that I have to finish it as quickly as possible. Like it’s a race. I scan from one sentence to the next. You can’t linger over Bell. I don’t really know what this means; it’s just the way I read Bell.

I was surprised to read that Bell’s title was inspired from Haruki Murkami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I have vivid memories of staying up late at church camp a couple of summers ago and reading that book by the light of my iPhone.

Bell has three talking points when he talks about God. He is With us, For us and Ahead of us.

I don’t really want to lay out those three points. Instead, when I talk about Bell, I want to talk about his use of the “profane”, the cultural vernacular. Bell is pop-theology, and that’s why he can draw such a large audience. He’s relative. He knows culture, high and low, but I’m not sure he distinguishes between the two. I think he sees all of life as this huge playground. He plays, skins his knees, deals with a bully, goes down the slide, climbs across the monkey bars, knowing God is with him, for him and somehow leading him as he plays. If he finds something interesting, he’ll tell you about it, but he doesn’t really care if you find it interesting or if it insults you. He’ll tell you how to define a word in Hebrew and then quote Ricky Bobby. He will make you listen.

I don’t read Bell because he offers great theological insight. I read Bell because Bell reminds me that all this writing and speaking and teaching involves real people in real lives who have other things on their minds and easily get bored and distracted when people talk about God. This isn’t just happening in my head for the sake of me becoming smarter, better, whatever. It’s happening because I want it to get in other people’s heads.

Bell was recently in Nashville speaking at Vanderbilt, and he did a Q&A session at the end of his talk. Someone asked for some advice, and one of the interesting things Bell suggested is that the guy should become a student of culture. I get the sense that this is what’s at the core of Bell’s speaking and writing, culture. I think he does his best to communicate – which, whatever you think about him, he’s pretty darn good at – and then he let’s God take it from there. Really, there’s not much else you can do.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

Four Moves of Transformative Learning

I pulled these four movements in transformative learning from from Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian. As someone who works in a school context, this was a good reminder that teaching is ultimately about action.

Before the four  movements, I should mention two ways we can think about our understanding of a subject: Logical Consciousness and Mythical Consciousness. Logical Consciousness is an attempt to explain the world by how it works. There are theories, laws, concepts at play in our world, and this way of understanding focuses on these ideas. Much of western education is built on this framework. Mythical Consciousness is the unspoken, ‘Why?’ questions that challenge the way the world operates. What are the symbols, the myths, that we hold close and why are they important to us?

Transformative learning attempts to address both aspects of learning. We examine the way the world works and then question why it works that way, refusing to merely accept something because it exists.

Disorienting Dilemma – Transformative learning engages a student with an idea, a thought or position that drastically alters their perception of the world. This is different from creating an experience to elicit an emotion or a conversion. A disorienting dilemma is a paradigm shift, a call to re-examine our current actions and beliefs. Once this shift occurs, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to go back to seeing the world the way it was before the experience. Encountering this kind of information causes us to create new folders in our brains to hold this information.

Critical Self-Reflection – Spiritual Formation and the Ignatian prayer of examen are critical components necessary to understand the movement of self-reflection (Recall, Return, Reveal, Review, React and Respond). I heard this recently from a student who spoke in chapel about her experiences in Honduras and, when asked what she learned, she spoke on how God challenged her sense of entitlement. She was convicted of the fact that she was living her life in such a way that she believed she should automatically receive what she wanted. Seeing people living with great needs caused her to reflect critically on her own life and passover a need for more stuff.

Discourse – As students reflect, it is important to have a community to engage them in what they are thinking. This is why we had a special day in chapel for students to think out loud about their experiences. My hope is that other students would ask them about something that was said and the conversation might continue. This is the shaping and echoing of ideas. It could also be seen as a method of spreading ideas cultivated during a time of self-reflection.

Action – Transformative learning seeks an action. For a student who experiences  as de-centering experience like a mission trip to Honduras and, after reflecting and talking with others she realizes her own sense of entitlement, a logical question should follow, what are you now going to do? Perhaps it’s sign up for the same trip next year, but it might be that she begins to de-clutter. Perhaps someone gives her a book on simplicity and continues to engage her on this path of discovery about letting go of her possessions as Jesus taught his followers.

I’ll let Deans’ own words wrap it up:

Like transformative learning, Christian teaching aims to enlarge consciousness – though the church credits expanded consciousness to the work of the Holy Spirit, not to teaching methodologies…Christian teaching seeks morphosis, an epistemological transformation so profound that it changes not just what the learner knows, it also changes the learner.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

The Professor and the Madman

In 2011 I was able to hear Simon Winchester speak at the Carter Center in Atlanta about his most recent book, The Atlantic. He even signed my copy! I had read the book over the summer while on a trip to France, and was enamored with Winchester’s tales of the open sea and the fact that I could look out of the plane window and see the very waters I was reading about below. I quickly became a fan. Winchester is an excellent mix of the professorial and the accessible, and it’s clear from his writing, and the stories he uncovers, that he is a serious and dedicated researcher who has a knack for uncovering the absurd historical narrative.

The Professor and the Madman is just such a story, and I waded through it in just a few days. Winchester tells the story of a Dr. Murray and a Dr. Morris who come to work together on one of the greatest undertakings in Victorian philology, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Dr. Morris is an American Civil War veteran who, though clinically diagnosed with a mental disorder and convicted of a crime, attributes thousands upon thousands of references to the completion of the first exhaustive English language dictionary. It takes Dr. Murray and his team several years to discover that the man who is mailing thousands of word references a year lives in an asylum for the criminally insane just a few miles away from Oxford.

When I finished The Professor and the Madman, I wondered why this story was so appealing to Winchester, and why I could not put it down. What is it about this story that Winchester would dedicate several months (years?) of his professional career to tracing out the minutia and composing the prose? I expected Winchester to provide an answer to this question once he completed his story, but the most he offers are a few lines about society’s view of mental illness and juxtaposes the lives of Dr. Murray and Dr. Morris as being strangely similar. One labors on the dictionary from a hastily constructed study behind his house and the other from a plush cell in an asylum.

Perhaps Winchester chose this story because it leaves the reader with questions. Was Dr. Morris’ life in the asylum tragic or was it somehow providential? Did his work on the OED offer him a form of redemption in this life? Or was his role as a medical doctor in the Civil War, murder, and work on the dictionary merely coincidental?

History has several functions, but it appears that Winchester has found a way to uncover historical narratives that ask us to probe at classical questions that have stood just out of reach of mankind for millennia. In Victorian England, when so much of the world was thought to be understood, and within a project seeking to define, classify and deconstruct every English word, lies a tale asking us to reconsider questions at the core of humanity.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

Bonhoeffer’s Three Questions of Theology

In a previous post, I briefly described Andrew Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry and the tagline from the book of taking the relational aspects of youth ministry and turning it into a more robust theology.

Root draws heavily from Bonhoeffer throughout his book, and while the choice of Bonhoeffer may seem strange, Root points out that Bonhoeffer served as the secretary of youth in the ecumenical movement. So, it could, as Root argues, be true that though Bonhoeffer never explicitly wrote about youth ministry, his theology was probably written with teens in mind.

Here are Bonhoeffer’s three questions of theology with commentary and notes by Root.

Where is Jesus Christ? Christ is in the world and in the church. He is present in the relational aspects of this world and stands in between the transcendence of human relationships. As I can never know, completely and fully, my daughter as she grows and matures, we can never fully know each other. Humans are transcendent from one another. With this in mind, Root describes Christ as standing within this otherness, mediating the humanity of one person to another as the true human. With such a serious perspective of relationships, it becomes difficult to use the presence of Christ in such a utilitarian manner. “One does not love God in the neighbor, nor are neighbors loved to make them Christian-neighbors are loved for their own name sake, and in this love of the human companions one serves the will of God.”

What then shall we do?  Root uses ‘place sharing’ as a term to describe the formation of relationships. We “take the self of the other into my own self.” We do not lose ourselves in this process, but we make their suffering our own and as we stand with and for them, we come to know God. And this act is consistently done only through the presence of Jesus. We take on guilt in this process which is why, for Bonhoeffer, he made the decision to renounce his pacifism and become complicit in the assassination of Hitler. When we ignore the humanity of others, we violate our belief that Christ is place-sharer for all of humanity.

Root ends his work with some ideas about youth ministry, describing ways to create a youth ministry with a healthy focus on the relational. I valued, as a bit of an introvert, his insistence that the youth worker need not be “crazy, wild and maniacally outgoing.” Instead the youth worker should look for ways to foster organic relationships between teens and adults. It is around common, shared interest or task that relationships organically form. The youth worker’s job is to think about ways to have the humanity of those whose are other interact and, through that interaction, share in the presence of Christ.

Root has given me some theological chops to hold onto while I talk about the importance of a relational youth ministry. He has provided several good counters and corrections to the problems that can come from a relational ministry which fails to take seriously the relationship as the place where Christ is.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry

If there’s a buzz word in youth ministry it’s ‘relational.’ Every activity from game nights to day outings and youth group classes to mission trips are conducted with an eye towards building relationships. But what does this mean?

In my own ministry, I’ve used the term when talking about creating clubs at school, positing this time as an opportunity for students and teachers to get to know each other in a different way. Clubs would give students a chance to build relationships with teachers over a shared interest like fishing or obscure indie music. Many thought it was strange that such an initiative was coming from the Spiritual Formation team, but we were able to sell it because it was ‘relational.’

But what was I talking about when I suggested that teachers use this time to ‘build relationships with teens?’

If you had asked me this question six months ago, I would have talked about the importance of having a student feel comfortable enough with an adult so that when they began asking questions about faith and salvation, they would have someone they would listen to. My theology of relational youth ministry hinted at a principle of influence. We build relationships with teenagers and then we use those relationships to influence them to make good decisions and commitments of faith.

Andrew Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry challenges this idea of using relationships as a strategy to influence teens. Using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology of community and relationship, Root questions and reforms youth ministry’s fascination with relational, urging ministers and teachers to embrace a deeper theology of incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.

In the first section of Root’s work, he reminds us of the historical roots of relational ministry, tracing out the beginnings of adolescence as a distinct developmental stage. Through para-church organizations like Young Life, the church hired youth ministers who were trained in the practice of building community by using the influence of popular teens.  Youth leaders sought out those who were “cool,” made them believe that they too were cool, formed relationships with them and capitalized on that friendship to reach out to other students.

Root goes on to correct this method of ministry by examining Bonhoeffer’s three questions of theology: Who is Jesus Christ? Where is Jesus Christ? What then shall we do?  I’ll examine each of these in a future post.

I really valued Root’s analysis of relational ministry and the way he utilized Bonhoeffer’s theology to describe a theology of youth ministry. For too long I myself have felt uncomfortable with the view that youth ministry success is focused on the dynamics of the group’s leader. Instead, Root calls for youth workers to reexamine their theology of using relationship for the sole purpose of influence because it is within these relationships that Christ dwells.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home, Resources

In-Service Prayer for Students

We give praise to you God for you hold our lives in your hands. You cause the sun to rise and you call us from our sleep so that we might spend our working hours teaching others to follow you. We are thankful for our work here and within your greater kingdom. May our eyes look to you for guidance as we work from class period to class period.

As we work today to prepare our hearts and minds for a time of prayer for our students, we are reminded of Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew 6, and our hope is to put those words into action and in service to you.

When we pray for our students, may we go into our offices and our classrooms and shut the door and pray in secret, just as your son taught us.

May we not babble on and on, thinking that our words carry strength, but may we listen for your quiet voice and spirit urging us to act in the lives of our students. Give us the strength whe need to respond.

May our students know that you are holy, and may we model this in our teaching and in our actions with one another.

May our students come to serve you in your kingdom, and give their total allegiance to you above all things. Protect them from other callings and other voices that don’t align with this call.

May our students know your will for their lives, and live on earth as it already is in heaven. Help our students to respect us as their teachers, and may we respect them, and teach them to love each other, as well as their enemies.

Sustain our students with love and compassion and joy. Those who are in homes and families where this is in short supply, or where parents are just too busy, we pray that we might provide some of the love they need to grow and serve you and others. Give us the wisdom to see what our students need and give us strength to provide it.

May we forgive our students when they disrespect us. Help us to love them when they are unloveable. And help us to use these moments to teach our students what it means to truly love and care for another.

We thank you for the saving grace of Jesus’ blood. May all of our students claim him as Lord and savior of their lives and come to know him in their minds, hearts and hands and feet.

Lord, help us to be a forgiving people. Help us to be united in service to you at this school.

By the grace of Jesus’ name we pray,

Amen.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

Bushnell and Christian Nurture

Horace Bushnell (1802 – 1876) proposed the idea that it was the duty of the Christian parent to nurture faith, never alerting the child to the fact that they have any other identification other than Christian.  He stated this was nothing new and uses scripture and church history to support this thesis:

That the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise. (p. 10 Christian Nurture)

Bushnell saw this approach to Christian Education the more desirable because of the focus on identification and practice, rather than an attempt to teach a child that he or she is a sinner and then working to teach them that they must choose to follow God.

The Christian is one who has simply begun to love what is good for its own sake, and why should it be thought impossible for a child to have this love begotten in him? (p. 16 Christian Nurture)

Bushnell believed that the Spirit of God was just as active in the lives of the young as in the old, and that the best time to capture a child’s heart for God was when they were young.  As a child grows and matures, questions will arise and these questions should be answered, but this is done in the child’s timing, and not governed by parents or teachers, reflecting notions of Romanticism from a generation or two before.

Bushnell’s work is best characterized as an attempt to develop a deep sense of identity in a child as one of God’s children, hinging this work on God’s spirit and movement among His people.   Of course, the role of community in this process is extremely important.  A child needs a strong community with a sense of shared life and similar goals in order to help reinforce and develop their Christian identity.

Horace Bushnell – Christian Nurture